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Some authors have a very hard time understanding that in order to be faithful to the spirit of the book, it's almost always impossible to remain faithful to the text. You have to make changes.

Richard Russo

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Richard Russo
Age: 75
Born: 1949
Born: July 15
Novelist
Screenwriter
Writer
Johnstown
New York
Faithful
Book
Remain
Hard
Changes
Make
Impossible
Always
Almost
Time
Understanding
Authors
Spirit
Text
Order

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Movies have to handle time very efficiently. They're about stringing scenes together in the present. Novels aren't necessarily about that.
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Knowing and knowing what to do about it were two different things.
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...aware, as always, that the truth isn't much of substitute for a good answer.
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He looks like he could be taken in a fight. Not by me, but by somebody. Not anyone in Humanities, probably.
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They stayed, many of them, because staying was easier and less scary than leaving.
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There are a great many sins in this world, none of them original.
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People sometimes get in the habit of being loyal to a mistake.
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Stories worked much the same way . . . A false note at the beginning was much more costly than one nearer the end because early errors were part of the foundation.
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Go to it. Be bold. Be true. Be kind. Rotate your tires. Don't drink so much. There aren't going to be enough liver transplants to go around.
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Bookstores, like libraries, are the physical manifestation of the wide world's longest, most thrilling conversation.
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I think that if people are instructed about anything, it should be about the nature of cruelty. And about why people behave so cruelly to each other. And what kind of satisfactions they derive from it. And why there is always a cost, and a price to be paid.
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I was the one who did come through that door. You were the one she was waiting for.
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After all, what was the whole wide world but a place for people to yearn for their heart's impossible desires, for those desires to become entrenched in defiance of logic, plausibility, and even the passage of time, as eternal as polished marble.
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If there's an enduring theme in my work, it's probably the effects of class on American life.
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I can be glib and truthful all at once.
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Steve Yarbrough's Safe from the Neighbors will take your breath away. Ambitious, funny, sad, smart, and beautifully crafted, it's everything a novel should be.
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It's possible to overlook character flaws of in-laws for the simple reason that you feel neither responsible for them nor genetically implicated.
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Who but an English professor would threaten to kill a duck a day and hold up a goose as an example?
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A short story is something that I think can be intuited and envisioned and held in your mind almost at once.
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I was pretty dead set against ever writing an academic novel. It's always been my view that there are already more than enough academic novels and that most of them aren't any good. Most of them are self-conscious and bitter, the work of people who want to settle grudges.
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